Persons who have either worked or purchased goods at any typical, established retail business understand the general concept underlying a cash drawer. A recessed or closed drawer operates as a secure depository of currency and credit card receipts until a financial transaction occurs, at which time the drawer is opened to access the contents. Many cash drawers smoothly and automatically slide open when their latch means engaging the cash drawers are opened and biasing springs push the drawer outward and open. These latches can be activated by, for instance, a solenoid receiving an electrical signal or by a mechanism connected to a cash drawer key. Other cash drawer models, both of earlier vintage as well as some produced today, must be manually pulled open. However, for many people, the most noticeable and recognizable aspect of the standard cash drawer may be the distinctive ring of a bell which often accompanies the opening of the drawer.
The simple outward appearance and function of standard cash drawers belies the complexity of their design and construction. This complexity results from the cash drawer being designed to provide operative feature; necessary for its intended use. For instance, one important feature of a cash drawer is a smooth motion of travel having minimal frictional resistance, whereby the drawer can either be automatically pushed opened at an acceptable rate by a biasing spring or alternatively be pulled open with a slight, and therefore acceptable, amount of force. To provide this feature, the drawer assembly must be precisely manufactured such that the drawer freely travels along its slides. A second important feature is easy removal of the cash drawer from its housing. Cash drawers must frequently be removed for a variety of reasons including, for example, to check that no money has accidentally slipped over the back of the drawer and into the drawer recess within the housing. To provide this feature, the cash drawer should be designed to be readily disengageable from the housing, preferably without tools.
Existing cash drawers have been designed which attempt to adequately address both these features. However, as the furthering of one feature hinders the other in most drawer slide designs, there is a limit to how much either feature can be achieved. Most cash drawers have a latch located at the upper periphery of the back of the drawer that strikes the interior front of the housing to prevent the drawer from inadvertent removal. However, this location of the latch requires one to go the cumbersome process of inserting their hand deep into the drawer and housing to reach to the back of the drawer to actuate the latch.
With regard to other design shortcomings of present cash drawers, it must be noted that the majority of cash drawer assemblies utilize slides located on each side of the cash drawer. A first slide member or rail, mounted on each side of the drawer, slidably engages a corresponding mating rail mounted within the housing. Bearing means between these rails assist their relative motion. The tighter the bearing means, which translates to less play between the slide rails and therefore in the drawer, the better the cash drawer assembly suspension and the smoother the motion of the drawer. However, proper reinsertion of the removed cash drawer into the housing is more difficult when there is little play in the slides. A more exact alignment of the rails made necessary by the tighter bearings requires that a person direct more time and effort toward the reinsertion process. Another shortcoming of this configuration is that during drawer reinsertion and the concomitant mating reengagement of the rails, the leading edge of the housing mounted rail can scar or unseat the bearings of the slide system located in the drawer mounted rail. This damage further detracts from the smoothness of drawer motion. In addition, most cash drawers are constructed such that one rail of each slide is fixedly connected to the drawer, and the drawer is removed by disengaging the connected rail from the mating rail connected to the housing. With such systems, the rail connected to the drawer sometimes protrudes from the back of the drawer. Upon reinserting the drawer back into the housing, the protruding portion is frequently inadvertently struck against the exposed front or top of the housing, resulting in unsightly dents and scratches in the finish.
A variety of manufacturing and design difficulties, some related to and others independent of the above features, continue to frustrate the current cash drawer industry in their attempts to create the most efficient design. The provision of mating slide rails respectively mounted on the drawer sides and housing sides is a common design choice of the industry, primarily to reduce material and assembly costs of manufacture while also minimizing the profile of the cash drawer assembly. This type of design is lacking in several respects. In order to provide smooth drawer travel, the slides must be mounted with tight tolerances. For example, side mounted slides allow for undesirable side to side play of the cash drawer. In addition to reducing the sturdiness of the cash drawer, cash drawer play also comprises the effectiveness of the latching means which latches the cash drawer in a closed position within the housing. Also, as the cash drawer assembly sides are subjected to a major portion of the external forces encountered during shipping and handling, the manufacturing plant quality alignment may be lost. After months or years of day-to-day use, side mounted cash drawer slides typically become misaligned. Any of these conditions can result in racking or binding, rendering the cash drawer sliding mechanism inoperable. Consequently, the slides must be properly realigned, frequently by the manufacturer, which commands a wasteful redundancy of time and effort and is therefore quite expensive.
Linear slides mounted on the bottoms of the drawer and housing, while remedying many of the shortcomings of the side mounted slides, introduce a multitude of different shortcomings for which the cost of correcting negates any advantages. Specifically, when mating rails are positioned on the housing bottom and engage bottom mounted drawer rails, unless great care is taken to ensure the slides are mounted parallel they will not slide freely and may hinder or even prevent drawer movement. Attempts to correct this shortcoming vary from exacting tolerances in manufacture, thereby avoiding the problem altogether, to providing play in the mounting of the slides to the housing by using expensive shoulder rivets. These solutions have proven mostly unsuccessful mostly due to their prohibitive labor cost and materials cost: respectively. The latter solution is also unacceptable because of its fragility and limited working life. Furthermore, because of the manner in which slide rails normally mate, bottom mounted drawer slides must be thicker in order to be sufficiently rigid to not yield under the weight of the cash drawer contents. Therefore, when such slides are used with existing cash drawers, the distance between the drawer bottom and the housing bottom is increased. As a result, the cash drawer assembly has an undesirable higher profile which decreases both its aesthetics and convenience.
In order to better serve its designated function, cash drawers usually receive a till or money tray. A till, which is a readily recognizable portion of a standard cash drawer, consists of multiple compartments appropriately sized for currency and coins. To provide for credit card receipts and bills of high denomination, tills are often designed with downwardly extending flanges at their bottom sides to create a media space between the cash drawer bottom and the till bottom for these items. When more media space is needed, the flanges are made larger or expensive brackets may be added to the till or drawer. As the credit card industry burgeons and consumers continue to opt for credit cards over cash, the need for increased media space in cash drawer assemblies is rapidly developing. Standard till designs with flanges will at some point be unable to match the demand for media space without rendering obsolete much costly equipment currently in use. Specifically, for security purposes many businesses utilize a till safe. These safes, which contain shelves of set heights for storing standard-sized cash laden tills that are not in the cash drawers, have a limit on the depth of till designs which they can accommodate. Therefore, in the future, standard cash drawers with their standard till designs may eventually become obsolete unless large expenditures of funds for modernizing complementary equipment such as till safes are appropriated by the cash drawer users.
As is apparent from the foregoing many existing cash drawers suffer from deficiencies such as the requirement of excessive labor and materials for manufacture, rail alignment degradation, and difficulty in removing a drawer from, and reinserting it into, the housing.